Official figures show that the unemployment rate in Greece jumped to 27.6 percent in July from a revised 27.5 percent in June, as the financial crisis continues to take its toll on jobs in the country.

Greece’s statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday that 1.36 million people were unemployed in July, up ten percent from a year earlier.

The country’s jobless rate was over twice the eurozone’s average of 12 percent in August.

The Greek government expects some growth in the job market in 2014. However, Athens forecasts unemployment to stay high even then, at an average 26 percent.

Meanwhile, the country’s largest labor union, the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE), anticipates unemployment to surpass 30 percent in coming years.

Greece was severely hit by recession in 2008 due to fiscal mismanagement resulting in tax rises and spending cuts.

The country has witnessed three years of austerity policies imposed by the government in a bid to win bailout loans from international creditors, including the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission.

Nearly one in every four Greek workers is unemployed; banks are in a shaky position, and pensions and salaries have been severely slashed.

The Geek government predicts that the economy will begin to grow again next year at a feeble 0.6 percent.

Professor Tamas argues that liberal democracy was unravelling as early as the 1980s but that things have become very evident after the recession, and it’s become particularly severe today. One of the central arguments he makes is that an increasing percentage of the global population falls completely outside of our dominant social order. Technology has made labour redundant for many in the world, and so they exist outside of the typical capital-labour relationship.

It seems to me that nowadays we are not only failing to fulfill the moral and theoretical conditions of what would constitute a liberal democracy, but even our faith in the fundamental principles is dwindling as a result of some changes. These changes consist mostly of technological and economic developments that partly through globalization (i.e. the flight of capital to lower wage regions of the world; therefore, the demolition of traditional North American and European manufacturing industries and other economic assets have been stripped and just exported to where there is technology on the one hand, and on the other hand, cheap labour). But most importantly, these technological developments make it so that every human activity is so mechanized—to use the old expression—digitalized, and miniaturized, and robotized, and automated and so on, that the old dispensation according to which most people worked in manufacturing or in services and commerce, it’s not true of today. There won’t be again full employment. Most people will be outside of productive work—productive meaning producing commodities that can be sold on the market. And that means that the previous modals of social organization, which were mostly work, will be lacking. They will be characteristic of only a minority of the populations, and the rest of us will be dependent upon the community itself to survive.http://www.zcommunications.org/the-failure-of-liberal-democracy-by-matthew-brett-1.html